Betty: The International Bestseller

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On the Savage Side is gorgeously written. If you are looking for humor or hope then this is not the book for you. It’s gritty and dark and we feel for these lost souls. This must have been a difficult book to write. But it really had to be written.” Tiffany McDaniel takes her time here as she paints us a vivid picture of the stories Landan shares with Betty and his ways. The story is rich in the everyday life of the characters that is as bold as it is normal. At times it did feel a bit much for me, making the book feel longer than it needed to be and at times, I lost some focus. My father’s hands were soil. My mother’s were rain. No wonder they could not hold one another without causing enough mud for two. And yet out of that mud, they built us a house that became a home. But despite the hardship she faces, Betty is resilient. Her curiosity about the natural world, her fierce love for her sisters, and her father's brilliant stories are kindling for the fire of her own imagination, and in the face of all she bears witness to, Betty discovers an escape: she begins to write. She recounts the horrors of her family's past and present with pen and paper and buries them deep in the dirt--moments that has stung her so deeply, she could not tell them, until now. Inspired by the life of her own mother, Tiffany McDaniel sets out to free the past by telling this heartbreaking yet magical story--a remarkable novel that establishes her as one of the freshest and most important voices in American fiction. Rating this one a four out of five as I don’t think I would personally be able to read this again. But I certainly highly recommend this one to all that are able to read it, just mind the trigger warnings.

Eight novels in a year may sound like a lot, but McDaniel talks about writing like one taking urgent instructions. She is strict in her ways: she has no outlines or plans, writes strictly chronologically and only starts when she has the title and the first line. It takes her a month, on average, to write a book. “They need to get out,” she says. In this photo, Mamaw Alka is holding my mother as a baby. It’s 1954, and Mom is just a few weeks old. The oldest daughter, Fraya, stands at her mother’s side, while Flossie, the middle daughter, strikes a pose in front wearing cowboy boots in just her size, her pale blonde hair blowing in the wind like her mother’s. I always look at this photo and notice the way the house appears to be leaning, as if about to slide off a hillside. And they, standing there, ready as a family, hoping for the best. Betty is woven of many things, light and dark, and most of all it is life in all its shades: all its brilliances and disappointments, sadnesses and hopes. Vivid and lucid, Betty has stayed with me’ be it in the woods or in their house: ( sometimes the story had a childlike fairytale ‘feel’)... but with the devastations - it’s not a child’s book)

Betty by Tiffany McDaniel – Highly recommended

The novel follows the eponymous Betty, the third daughter (and fourth child) of the Carpenter family. Betty grows up in Breathed with her 5 siblings in a house from which the previous family disappeared, missing and presumed murdered due to the bullet holes found in the walls. Betty's father is Cherokee, her mother white, yet she is the only child with her father's dark hair and complexion. As a result Betty is the victim of merciless racism from kids at school, townspeople and even her own siblings. The bulk of the plot is made up of telling the story of Betty's life between the ages of 6/7 to 15, weaved together with tales of her siblings and their fates.

oh and p.s—whatever landon's “pudding pie” is; this wondrous magic of “multicolored gelatin cubes suspended in pink gelatin,” i want the recipe.*

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This novel is inspired by my mother Betty’s life and I couldn’t have asked to be raised by a better woman. I am inspired daily by her intelligence, her creativity, her determination, and her strength. The poem ‘My Broken Home,’ at the beginning of the novel, was written by her. And when I read the lines, ‘you give me a wall / and I’ll give you hole,’ I understood that she was finally breaking down the walls and freeing everything behind them. Mom is so thrilled to see the book out on the shelf. And to all you readers, she thanks you dearly for reading this story. I hope in these photos you see not only her beauty on the outside, but her beauty within. May Bettythe novel and Betty the person inspire and empower girls like her to dare to dream and never give up.

It was a long road for McDaniel – she wrote her first novel at 18, but was 25 before she had an agent and only several years later did a manuscript start going out to publishers: “It was terrible, because editors would say, ‘Oh I loved it’ and after all this wonderful, long stuff they’d say ‘but I’m not going to take it’.” They seemed astounded that she hadn’t been through an MFA program. “I didn’t even know that was a conversation people were having!” she says. After accepting that the first book she wrote would not be the first published, she returned to her bedroom and wrote eight more novels in around two years, with The Summer That Melted Everything the favourite in that batch. At times the sadness might feel relentless because it's so horrifying but I thought Tiffany McDaniel balanced it with the love, connections and stories she shared with us through Landon. I kept imagining how relentless the violence might have felt for Tiffany and Betty and how much courage they both had in telling their stories.A stunning, lyrical novel set in the rolling foothills of the Appalachians about a young girl and the family truths that will haunt her for the rest of her life. Perhaps in this picture she is on the verge of imagining a different future. At the very least, a place different than the hell she had come from. I realized then that pants and skirts, like gender itself, were not seen as equal in our society. To wear pants was to be dressed for power. But to wear a skirt was to be dressed to wash the dishes. Guernica: Betty takes place in Breathed, Ohio, the same setting as your first novel, Summer That Melted Everything . How did Breathed came to be? McDaniel’s latest novel, Betty, is a book she wrote many years ago, when she was only seventeen years old, but it was just published this summer—four years after her debut, The Summer That Melted Everything . Betty is a heroic coming-of-age story inspired by McDaniel’s own family history, centering on a family secret her mother told her some twenty years ago. It follows her mother—then a young girl named Betty Carpenter, who is one of eight siblings—as she tries to figure out her place in society and within her own family. (McDaniel even uses the real names of her relatives in the book.) Betty’s father, Landon, the town’s plant healer, is Cherokee, and Betty has inherited his talent for storytelling, his love of nature, and his dark skin. Her mother, Alka, is a white woman who finds Betty’s physical resemblance to Landon irritating and often lashes out at her because of it. She calls her daughter “Pocahontas,” and tells her that princesses don’t have “mud-colored skin and stringy hair” like hers. Betty’s sister Flossie follows suit, telling Betty she’s ugly because her skin is darker than that of her siblings. Betty’s appearance also draws attention from her community; her neighbors call her “dirty” and her teachers and classmates shame her at school.